


Do No Harm

by Geoduck



Category: Fruits Basket
Genre: Angst, Car Accidents, Gen, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-28 22:38:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8465626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geoduck/pseuds/Geoduck
Summary: Hatori is more than qualified to provide first aid to the injured. But what can he do to one who has no physical injuries at all?





	

I didn't see the accident, but it must have happened only shortly before I got there: no emergency vehicles there yet, not even any onlookers.

I pulled over, and turned my hazard lights on. I grabbed my bag and jogged over to the car.

I almost needn't have bothered hurrying. As I looked into the broken driver-side window, the couple I saw in the front seat were dead already. A sickening sight. I was about to check on the driver of the truck they had hit, when I heard a faint sob.

I cringed at my own stupidity. Of course. I should have checked the back seat.

There was a child, around six or seven, sitting secured in a booster seat. The safety belts had saved the child's life.

"Are you hurt?", I asked.

The child looked to me blankly—in mental shock, if not in physical.

"Hold on, I'm going to try the door." Despite the fact that the car's frame had been deformed by the crash, I was able to open the rear driver-side door without too much difficulty.

As I undid the safety belts, I spoke in the most soothing tones I know. "My name is Dr. Sohma. What's yours?"

"Ha-Ha-Hanako."

"Hello, Hanako. I'll bet you're already five years old."

"I'm six."

"Six! That big already? Now Hanako, do you hurt anywhere?" She shook her head. She did not seem to have any injuries—the spatters of blood on her clothing was not hers—so I tried to ease her out of the car.

She resisted. "Mommy... Daddy..."

Oh god. Why the hell did I have to be here? What use is a doctor when the only victims are either physically unhurt or already dead?

I wanted to lie and say that they were going to be all right. Let someone else tell the tiny little girl that her father and mother had been killed.

"What happened, Hanako?"

"Daddy yelled—crash. Loud. Mommy..." She tried to talk, but no further words came out.

As I looked at this girl, I saw other faces superimposed over hers. Kisa, savagely beaten. Isuzu, rejected by her parents in a fit of insane rage. Kyo, witnessing his mother's suicide.

Momiji, losing his mother utterly. Yuki, begging me not to take his only friends away from him.

Kana.

My career is a mockery of medicine. I don't heal anyone, I just patch them together so that they can be ripped apart again.

But there's one thing I can do.

This ability my father taught me: I have only ever used it when Akito demanded I do. Always it's been against my will. But for once, I would be my own master.

I gently placed my hand over a young girl's eyes. I concentrated.

There was a flash of light. 

* * *

It was only a few minutes between when I first arrived on the scene of the accident, and when the emergency vehicles go there. But at the time, it felt as though I had aged years.

The driver of the truck was alive, but injured: he was hospitalized for treatment of a concussion.

After having been officially pronounced dead at the scene, Hanako's parents were carefully delivered to the morgue.

And Hanako. One of the policewomen who arrived at the accident made the arrangements for the girl to be temporarily taken to the home of a kind social worker and her husband, until parental custody could be determined by a judge. The girl's remaining relatives agreed it would be best for Hanako to live with the family of her father's older brother, and the judge agreed. The last I heard, they intended to officially adopt her.

After I altered her memories, she cried when I told her that her parents had died. But they were the tears of heartbreak and grief—not the hysterical shrieks of a child who has seen the ultimate horrors of blood and death.

I wonder if I can't help people heal after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Written and published at ff.net in 2009. The title comes from the Hippocratic oath.


End file.
